When Sir Peter Bazalgette, the man who brought Big Brother to the UK, was appointed chairman of Arts Council England, the level of opprobrium from some quarters was entirely predictable. "It is very worrying that someone who has dumbed down, trivialised and sexualised mass TV viewing with Big Brother has been put in charge of British culture," Labour MP Denis MacShane told Bazalgette's most relentless critic, the Daily Mail.

It was the Mail's Quentin Letts, Bazalgette's tormentor-in-chief, who named him one of the "10 worst Britons", and dubbed him a "brutal populist" and "buttery schmoozer" who "throws champagne parties at his £10m house" in Notting Hill. Bazalgette – or "Baz" as he is known to friends and colleagues – does indeed throw a memorable summer party in the gardens of his west London home. "It is probably the best group of media people you will get to meet, very eclectic but powerful," says venture capitalist Luke Johnson, chairman of Channel 4 when Bazalgette, 59, was one of its non-executive directors.

Where else could you meet Mark Thompson, outgoing director general of the BBC, and celebrity chef Ainsley Harriott, star of one of Bazalgette's earlier TV hits, over the canapes?

"He's a sort of renaissance man because not only has he been a great programme-maker and entrepreneur," adds Johnson. "He's written books, and he writes a food column for the FT. He's a fabulous networker, he's great company and – let's face it – he's ambitious."

In a 30-year television career, Bazalgette's list of credits extend beyond Big Brother. He was also responsible for the rise of programmes such as Ready Steady Cook, Changing Rooms and Ground Force which became global hits in the 1990s and would help make Bazalgette his fortune. The chattering classes looked down on those too. "He believed if something was popular then it was probably good," says Tim Hincks, president of Endemol Group, producer of Big Brother, who worked with Bazalgette for many years. "He enjoys controversy, he certainly likes a debate."

Knighted for services to television earlier this year, he will succeed Dame Liz Forgan – who also chairs the Scott Trust, owner of the Guardian – as chair of Arts Council England in February next year. He takes over at a critical time. The patron of 690 arts bodies across England and with £1.4bn to disburse, along with £850m from the National Lottery, has already suffered a near 30% cut in grants and faces the prospect of further cuts in 2015. The council is also in the process of slashing the amount of money it spends on its own administration from 11% of its total budget to 3.5%. "It's a very nervous time internally," says one insider.

Bazalgette is familiar with the challenges of funding the arts. He is a long-time board member and deputy chairman of the English National Opera, and was appointed its chairman in June. He has also served as a non-executive director at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), giving him a glimpse, when it comes to the next round of funding negotiations, over both sides of the fence.

"It is going to be another really tough spending round, and he needs to find the right arguments to convince the government that quite a small amount of spending on arts and culture brings phenomenally great rewards," says Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House. "We have to demonstrate that we are doing absolutely everything we can to bring money into the arts, but we still need support, especially outside of London. Having someone of Peter's background making those arguments will be really powerful."

The great-great grandson of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who built London's Victorian sewer system, Bazalgette was born in London in 1953 and went to Dulwich College in south-east London, where his contemporaries included Financial Times editor Lionel Barber, and then to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he become president of Cambridge Union. His university friend John Makinson, chairman of Penguin and the National Theatre, remembers him as a "superstar of the union. His trademark qualities are that he manages to be both irreverent and self-deprecating on the one hand, and yet serious and thoughtful on the other, all features that were well in evidence in his Cambridge days".

He is variously described as "fantastic fun and thoroughly approachable, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye", but with an occasional tendency to nod off in meetings. Linked to various of the big broadcasting jobs over the last decade, he came closest in 2002 when he was in the running to be chief executive of Channel 4, only to pull out at the last minute. Channel 4's Johnson discussed the same role with him two years later.

"I think he took the view that it was too much grief," remembers Johnson. "He had the entrepreneurial bug and was more interested in pursuing a range of different things."

Johnson also has a warning: "He may find chairing the Arts Council constraining. I am sure he is up to the task but he won't necessarily find it what he has been used to in recent times."

Sir Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of the Barbican Centre and, like Bazalgette, a member of the ENO board, describes him as "absolutely the right man for what is a very difficult job".

"The fact that Baz has been on the board of the DCMS will ensure there is continuity of thinking. The challenge will be how far he is prepared to criticise and distance himself from it; he does not want to be seen as an agent of the DCMS as chairman of the Arts Council."

Kenyon is quick to praise the marketing and digital nous that Bazalgette brought to ENO, and the new Arts Council chief is understood to be particularly keen on highlighting the commercial and cultural payback from state sponsorship of the arts. Both Stephen Daldry, head of the Olympics ceremonies, and Danny Boyle, who directed the acclaimed opening spectacular to the London Games, had their breaks in state-subsidised theatre (Daldry at the Sheffield Crucible, Boyle at the Royal Court Theatre).

Former ENO board member Janis Susskind, who stepped down in July, describes him as "thoughtful and energetic". She says: "It is better that he has seen from the inside what the challenges are in a major arts organisation rather than being some abstract theorist coming in from the outside."

Emerging from university with a third in law – possibly as a result of spending too much time writing the student newspaper gossip column – Bazalgette has joked that he had no option but to pursue a career in the media. He joined the BBC as a news trainee and was spotted by Esther Rantzen, who hired him to work as a researcher on That's Life. Bazalgette later said that he learned all he knew "at Esther's knee … it's all about informing and entertaining". He went on to produce BBC2's Food and Drink and set up his own company, Bazal, in 1987, which was sold to Dutch company Endemol three years later. He rose to become its creative director in 1998, stepping down from the company nearly a decade later.

Although he did not create Big Brother, he was closely involved in its UK incarnation which debuted on Channel 4 in 2000. It has been sullied by a string of controversies, including racism rows and an episode of on-screen violence which prompted viewers to call the police, but the first series was genuinely groundbreaking, not least for its use of streamed video on the internet. Axed by Channel 4, it has since been picked up by Channel 5.

Estimates of a seven-figure salary at Endemol are said to be over-inflated, but he did enjoy a bonus payout worth several million pounds during his time with the company, and enjoyed a further windfall when it was sold to Telefónica in 2000. He is certainly not doing his new job, which pays £40,000 for a two-day week, for the money.

Married with two children, he has earned enough to have two holiday homes, one in Tuscany and one on the south Devon coast, and his official Debrett's biography lists "gluttony" among his recreations. He is also a cricket fanatic – a colleague once said that he only hired him because he needed a wicketkeeper for his team.

Bazalgette consistently refuses to be drawn on his politics. The most anyone has got out of him was that he has voted for different parties. He was briefly involved with a Conservative party commission on reviving popular interest in the democratic process, but stepped down when it became too high-profile."He is interested in the political process and how government works, rather than having political ambitions in any obvious way," says Makinson. "He has very strong views on the BBC and Channel 4, and is interested in those organisations which sit on the boundary of private and public sector. He is very comfortable patrolling those boundaries. That's where [the Arts Council role] sits and I think he will be very good at it." Bazalgette was also on the advisory board of The Space, a digital joint venture between the BBC and the Arts Council that played host to new arts projects as well as archive material such as John Peel's record collection.

It had echoes of an idea Bazalgette floated four years ago for a new platform to showcase content from arts institutions, museums and galleries, if not the way it is funded – which, he suggested, could include the sale of Radios 1 and 2.

Roly Keating, the BBC's former director of archive content, and now chief executive of the British Library, who was closely involved in setting up The Space, says: "I was a huge fan of Liz Forgan. But if Liz is to leave, then in Baz they have found someone very different but of equal calibre and charisma.

"What Baz has is a zest for life and people and restless curiosity that made him a very good TV producer. Behind that sometimes sardonic facade is a very sharp brain at work."

Curriculum vitae

Born: 22 May 1953

Age: 59

Career: A TV producer and entrepreneur credited with helping to invent reality TV, Bazalgette created television shows including Ready Steady Cook, Changing Rooms and became creative director of Endemol, the company behind Big Brother and Deal or No Deal

High point: Launching Big Brother in the UK in 2000, after which he was routinely held responsible for everything that was good or bad about TV entertainment. The first series, a genuinely ground-breaking experiment, changed the face of television

Low point: See above. If the first series of Big Brother broke the mould, later series would be beset by scandal with a succession of race rows, on-screen fights, accusations of exploitation and no end of sexual shennanigans

What he says: "It is much more difficult making popular TV. It is very absorbing and challenging. I genuinely hope I am a no-brow person."

What they say: "[He has] done more to debase television over the past decade than anyone else." (Victor Lewis-Smith, 2003)